The University of Manitoba has acknowledged that a highly acclaimed piece of its agriculture research is not just bad science, but actually fraudulent.
The university investigated for months allegations that some of the research on plant genetics that Fawzi Razem had done for a team headed by scientist Robert Hill was bogus.
On July 30, more than half a year since the research had been retracted from Nature magazine, the university denounced the researcher and blacklisted him from employment.
“The committee concluded that certain experiments claimed to have been conducted, in fact, were not, and that results were fabricated,” said a university bulletin.
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“Dr. Razem will never be recommended for an academic appointment of any kind at the university and any formal requests for interaction of any kind between him and the University of Manitoba will be denied.”
Razem no longer works for the university.
The research had been highly publicized because it appeared to offer a key piece of information about how crops could be manipulated for purposes such as drought tolerance. With this knowledge, researchers would be able to develop plants that would allow farmers to produce more and better crops.
But New Zealand researchers were unable to duplicate the results. Many initially assumed there had simply been trouble with gathering or analyzing data, but over time rumours of outright fraud became prevalent.
The December retraction had been submitted in July and said, in part, that “we conclude that there is no effect of ABA on the FCA-FY interaction” but did not specify why the erroneous conclusions had been reached.
The university investigation made it clear the cause was fraud, but did not call for safeguards to be put in place.
“This case is a very rare and isolated incident, and there are already safeguards in place to prevent such occurrences,” said the bulletin.
Michael Trevan, the university’s dean of agriculture and food sciences, said mechanisms are in place to catch mistakes, accidental errors and simple sloppiness, but deliberate fraud is much harder to catch.
“Science, like many professions, relies a lot on trust,” said Trevan, who was involved in the investigation. He said the case is an example of what can go wrong in research, but also demonstrates how the system eventually catches errors and frauds.
“It’s highly regrettable, it damages the science, it damages the university, it certainly damages the individual, but the university’s process and the scientific process for catching these things worked,” said Trevan.
“That is the only point of comfort one can draw from this.”
